California State Universities will officially end the use of placement tests for freshmen and will now rely on a new policy to decide whether students are prepared for college or not.

According to a news release from the chancellor’s office, students enrolling at a CSU campus will no longer have to take English or mathematics tests to take classes for college credit.

Instead, as explained in the executive order, the universities will look at a combination of “high school grades and GPA, grades in collegiate courses, ACT and SAT scores, Advanced Placement test scores and Smarter Balanced Assessment” to decide if inbound students are ready for college-level work.

At the beginning of August, CSU’s chancellor Timothy White defined and sent to all campuses the reorganizations in the “Executive Order 1110.”

While the ACT, SAT and AP are standardized tests, CSU will now take a look at those scores in combination with grades and other factors instead of placement tests.

In addition to shifting how it measures whether students are ready for college work, CSU is also improving how the system assists students not ready for English and math classes at the university level. In the past, students often enrolled in no-credit helpful courses.

Now, these students can enter a “CSU Early Start Program” to earn college credit over the summer session.

They can enroll in the program at any CSU campus, or they can sign up for classes to earn college credit during the school year and receive more support and time with instructors.

In order to support advising and to more effectively use campus data to support student success, “approximately $10 million has already been provided to campuses for new course development and course redesign” and also “developing a series of technical assistance and professional development resources that will be available to campus faculty and staff” as described in the executive order.